The work of this moment

My main job in Lesotho was organizing three different theatre groups: a Burial Society improv group creating traditional Basotho comedy, a group of university students creating political theatre on campus, and a group of (grant-funded!) local actors creating theatre for AIDS education. Of these, the Burial Society group was the most kick-ass, revolutionary, life-giving group, and it left the deepest impression on my soul. For warm-ups we danced and sang together. 

The Burial Society was a polyglot group of vegetable vendors, office workers, and maintenance workers. Some were middle-class, some working-class, some desperately poor. Some were employed by the university; some just plied their trade on the university grounds. I never understood how it all worked mathematically, but each person kicked in some money each month, and the money was used for funerals. The theatre group aimed to raise money for the general fund by producing plays in the university auditorium and charging people to come see them. They functioned in the way Commedia dell’Arte functioned in the middle ages, with each actor specializing in a stereotype or “type” of character.* Madichaba, the mother of six children and a deaconess in her church, loved to play “bad” women: sex workers, seductresses, cruel stepmothers, faithless wives. M’e Lineo, a hefty grandmother, specialized in cross-dressing, playing abusive men who drank, stamped their feet, and harassed women. Ntate Neo, a cook in the campus cafeteria, played “good” men, usually miners who labored in South Africa and brought home gifts for their wives and children at the holidays. There was always a buffoon, an ingenue, and a villain, and there was usually a tear-jerking scene near the end, involving the death of somebody’s mother. 

Our rehearsals were supposed to take place during lunch hours, but people showed up at all points on the hour, and we never had a full rehearsal. Every time we staged a performance I was astonished at how well it worked. I joked with Buncombe that if I wrote a book about my life in Lesotho, the title would be Waiting in Empty Rooms. What I loved best about Basotho culture was also the hardest for me to adjust to: (1) being “on time” is never as important as being fully present in the moment, and (2) always greet everyone you meet as if they are the only person in the world. Beautiful. And yet it means that nobody ever gets anywhere at a predictable time. Despite this, plays are staged. Life goes on. Tasks are accomplished.

I didn’t say this to my office mate then, but I say it to the world now: if we can’t change the system, it is sometimes possible to work the system in a way that serves the people, and to support people who aim to bring that system to its knees. The Burial Society failed to pay for the funerals of all its members, but it made life rich and enjoyable on the way to that goal. M’e Mpho, who spoke six African languages plus English and Afrikaans, became my Sesotho language teacher, for which I paid her. I also included her in the grant for the AIDS-education theatre group and paid her to walk around with a tape recorder and talk to people in the villages. And then when we started writing her life story, I paid her for her time on that. So after the first couple of weeks, I never had to humiliate myself by paying her to wash my clothes. 

Buncombe (not, as you have guessed, his real name) was all contradictions. He was a working class boy who earned his degrees at Oxford. He read literature in the context of Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, but he could be harsh and impatient with students, and loneliness tormented him. He never established an equitable loving relationship, and though he started each day with a British schoolboy’s good will for all, he grew meaner as he drank, his sarcasm laced with cruelty and self-loathing. I developed a deep and lasting affection for him, enjoyed his company when he was sober, and learned to spend time with him early in the day. By nightfall he was insufferable. 

Note: this is a continuation of a memoir begun here, continuing here, the most recent preceding episode here. 

Photo from RISE climate rally.

*Commedia was based on Roman comedy, and for all we know, Roman comedy may have arisen out of African improvisational drama. Terence, after all, was African.